At the Bar; It's the American way: Immigrant lawyers slash and hook over a hockey player's contract.

Anyone doubting that the melting pot is alive and bubbling should consider the case of VMP International v. Yushkevich, now grinding along before Judge Louis J. Freeh of Federal District Court in Manhattan. So should anyone concerned about the perennial problem of lawyers sniping at one another when a judge is not looking.

On one side of the case is Roman Popik (born in the Soviet city of Kishinev in 1956; law degree, Pace University, 1987). He runs VMP International. On the other side is Alexander Berkovich (born in Riga, Latvia, in 1957; law degree, Villanova University, 1987) and his partner, Mark Gandler (also born in Kishinev in 1956; law degree, Columbia University, 1991). They are proprietors of International Sports Advisers.

All are lawyer-agents, and their conflicting claims to represent the Russian-born hockey player Dimitri Yushkevich, now skating for the Philadelphia Flyers, have left them embroiled in a vicious court fight.

Mr. Popik has accused Mr. Yushkevich of breaching his contract with VMP by going over to the Berkovich-Gandler group, which represents 13 other players from the former Soviet Union now playing in the National Hockey League.

For all their successes here, the immigrant lawyers have not fared well in the land of the Freeh. Indeed, Judge Freeh has sent Mr. Berkovich, Mr. Popik and Mr. Popik's lawyer, David Abramson (born in Brooklyn in 1954; law degree, Brooklyn Law School, 1981) to the penalty box for the legal equivalent of slashing, roughing, hooking and high sticking.

First, in December, the judge fined Mr. Abramson and Mr. Popik $500 plus court costs and fees for their obstreperous and obstructionist behavior during Mr. Popik's deposition. Mr. Abramson's objections, he noted, were frivolous to the point of being obnoxiousness. For instance, though Mr. Popik, like the other Soviet-born lawyers in the case, is fluent in English, Mr. Abramson insisted that Mr. Berkovich define such words as "lived," "travel" and "do" before using them in his questions, stalling the proceedings to a crawl.

But before Mr. Berkovich could gloat too much, he too was fined $500 by Judge Freeh for hindering Mr. Abramson's questioning of Mr. Yushkevich with other silly objections. At the same time, the judge fined Mr. Popik $500 more for disrupting the proceedings, exchanging low-fives with Mr. Abramson, making faces at Mr. Yushkevich and, in one instance, muttering an obscenity at him.

Name-calling, mud-slinging and foot-dragging during depositions is nothing new, since these pre-examinations of witnesses are usually attended by opposing lawyers, the parties, a witness and a court reporter, but not by a judge. Nor is the outrage of judges called upon to play referee when one side or the other tattles.

A few years later, opposing lawyers in a deposition in the merger of the Gulf Oil Corporation and Chevron U.S.A. charged one another in court papers with lying, eavesdropping, snickering, making them miss their flights, reading USA Today instead of listening to the testimony, butchering both the English language and one another's names, and objecting often enough to exhaust the unfortunate court reporter.

One lawyer, Jay Robert Stiefel of Berger & Montague of Philadelphia, even suggested to Magistrate Michael Dolinger of the Federal District Court in Manhattan that he be awarded "the Nobel Prize for Patience" for putting up with Frederic Parnon of Lord, Day & Lord, Barrett Smith.

The magistrate complained afterward that the transcript was "littered with schoolboy insults traded between experienced and, no doubt, well-compensated counsel." He said the problem had eased a bit recently, but Michael Silberberg, a lawyer in New York, disagreed. "As litigators laboring in the trenches know only too well, the inappropriate behavior continues," he wrote earlier this month in The New York Law Journal.

That their case has become so bloody, Mr. Berkovich said, was a result of long-standing bad blood between the parties. Mr. Popik and Mr. Gandler did not especially like each another as high school classmates in Kishinev. Mr. Popik and Mr. Berkovich were not close when they both dated Barnard College students a few years later. And now they find themselves fighting over a 20-year-old stick handler.

But the fact that they have taken their squabble to court, Mr. Berkovich added, reflected how Americanized they had become. "If we fought each other in the streets or in a bar -- that would be more Russian," he said."

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A version of this article appears in print on February 12, 1993, on Page B00016 of the National edition with the headline: At the Bar; It's the American way: Immigrant lawyers slash and hook over a hockey player's contract. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe